Oskar Eustis on taking risks: “Damn the torpedoes!”

Oskar Eustis of New York’s Public Theatre will speak Wednesday, Oct. 6, in Colorado Springs (details at end). The following is a transcript of his advance conversation with Denver Post theater critic John Moore. Look for Moore’s essay, “Risk … Why bother?” including Eustis’ input, in the Sunday, Oct. 3, Denver Post.

John Moore: The theme of your talk will be “the state of the American theater.” That’s a big topic, but what is your general message coming into Colorado Springs on Wednesday?

Oskar Eustis: I think the theater is in a very funny, contradictory place, because I do feel like there is a lot of terrific work, and we have an unbelievably diverse base of theater artists who are more talented than any generation in American theater history. But ever since Reagan’s election in 1980, over the last 30 years, we have these institutions that have grown more conservative, as a whole. And so you have this lost opportunity right now where the theater, which is supposed to be the roughest and most democratic and most exciting of art forms, has gotten kind of timid and safe. And I think it’s the responsibility of those of us running these institutions to see if we can help create direct access between these amazing artists and the audiences that we’re able to command, and to try to put the theater back at the center of American culture. So that’s kind of my thumbnail on it.

Benjamin Walker is taking 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson' from The Public Theatre to Broadway. Photo by Joan Marcus

Moore: That’s quite a thumbnail. I want to follow that up with how that attitude applies to you in some ways.

Eustis: Sure.

Moore: I got to see “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” which was my favorite thing I saw in New York this year. But I’m wondering about how it applies to the process you use at the Public to you pick your seasons. How much does mission and artistic excellence drive those decisions versus financial concerns, commercial potential and flashy press opportunities – for example, celebrities and Broadway aspirations? How does that all work into how you choose your season?

Eustis: I am happy to say, John, that I actually don’t have to worry about the commercial aspects, for the most part. The business model that we have set up at the Public is this: Obviously up in (Central Park), we give away the seats. And downtown, our theaters are so small that when we do extend shows, they just give us more opportunities to lose money (laughs). So if I were to view this as a capitalist enterprise, it would be a dismal failure. The great thing is that physical structure of giving the seats away uptown, and having the tiny theaters downtown, constantly directs the work back to the mission. And so my job is to create a big tent that brings in work from Shakespeare to avant-garde work to new plays to musicals that speak to our time. To create those works, for the most part, as opposed to simply pick them, and then try to make sure that they have the biggest possible impact. So when we move something to Broadway like “Bloody Bloody,” I’d be pretty dumb if I were doing it for the money. Because the chances of it making any money are pretty dismal.

Moore: But you have famously said that you want theater to be free — and then the goal is to move shows to Broadway, which charges prices that people can barely afford. Is there another way that we could define success in the American theater that does not rely on a capitalist value system, but instead makes a huge cultural impact on new terms?

Eustis: Oh God, yes, and I hope that we do that all of the time at the Public. “Bloody Bloody” was a huge success before we moved it to Broadway. And indeed, moving it to Broadway is not likely to be the crowning glory of “Bloody Bloody.” What moving it to Broadway is likely to do is to kind of give it a cultural impact that it wouldn’t have if it just stayed down at the Public. So again, my goal is to get it onto the biggest possible platform. But we’ve done a lot of shows at the Public that I think have been extraordinary successes that have not a prayer of moving. Just this last year for example, “In the Red and Brown Water,” from the “Brother/Sister” trilogy of Tarell McCraney … I was as proud of that as anything we’ve done in years. And again, there was not a whisper of moving that commercially. But it was really an extraordinary launching pad for a young African-American artist who I completely believe in. So, to me, that’s success that has nothing to do with the commercial.

Moore: So if the Public Theatre is the American version of the National Theater in London, as some people argue, why is it important today that Shakespeare is at the heart of that programming — rather than great American works?

Eustis: Shakespeare remains all of our property. He’s not English property. He’s the greatest dramatist who ever wrote. Many people would say he’s the greatest writer who ever wrote — certainly in English, which I can speak of with some authority. I can’t speak for all the other languages. But you know, around the world, they kind of think that, too. I think there was a whole confluence of things, and part of it, of course, was just the individual talent of William Shakespeare of Stratford, England – and by the way, those plays were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford, England. But another part of it was, through the miracle of the Tudor Compromise, Shakespeare was faced at that moment with an audience at the Globe Theatre that was more economically and culturally diverse and democratic than any audience a Western playwright had faced since the time of the Greeks. For 2,000 years. Therefore, he had to write plays that spoke to all of those people at once. He had to entertain illiterate groundlings and aristocrats and Cambridge graduates at the same time. And that demand produced a body of work: Thirty-seven plays that are models for what the theater can do. Just one example of this: There is no such thing as a private, personal relationship in Shakespeare. Every relationship, no matter how intimate, is always seen as part of a family, as part of a state, as part of a culture. He wrote all of those things simultaneously. And why? Because it’s true. And it’s just as true for us as it was for them. We just don’t see it that way.
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